Category: literature

I guess “Norman Mailer, Outspoken Novelist, Dies at 84,” is better than “Norman Mailer, Novelist Who Stabbed His Wife, Dies at 84.”

I found Charles McGrath’s obit more entertaining than any of the Mailer I’ve tried to read, and I hope someday I can “reliably be counted on to make oracular pronouncements and deliver provocative opinions, sometimes coherently and sometimes not.”

(Update: the NYTimes has changed the headline on its main page from “Outspoken Novelist” to “Towering Writer”! And the obit itself has gone to “Towering Writer With Matching Ego”!)

(Update #2: Two of the contemporary writers I respect most have implied that I’m sort of a bonehead for making that remark, and that I need to read An American Dream and Executioner’s Song, as well as Mailer’s early essays. I’ll put some on my wishlist.)

Maybe I’m misreading the signs, but it looks like we’re due for a round of worlds-enough-and-time! In this case, the publication of Pierre Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read opens the door for literary types to name the “great books” that they’ve never read (and likely will never get around to).

In this case, Slate has followed up 2001’s Literary Critic’s Shelf of Shame with a new piece: The Great Novel I Never Read. While the former canvassed critics (duh), this new feature garners responses from contemporary authors.

I’m usually leery of this sort of exercise, as it can degenerate into people disparaging some legitimately great novels because they’ve never gotten around to reading them. I used to think that I keep that gigantic list of all the books I’ve finished since I began college in 1989 just to scare people out of asking my opinion about any particular book. After looking over this article, I’m starting to think that my real reason is to justify not having read some of those great books, myself: “Ferchrissakes! Look at how many other books I’ve read! There are only so many hours in a day!”

(Of course, I’m guilty of disparaging great books on flimsy grounds, most recently in my rant about the immediate sense of alienness (not alienation) I got when starting Middlemarch earlier this month. Of course, now that I’m around 500 pages in, I’m wondering how I managed to get this far in life without reading it. And, sure, maybe I felt more sympathy for Casaubon than the average Middlemarch reader, but I’m a sucker for a classically trained scholar who can’t bring himself to start writing his great work. Go figure.)

Fortunately, that snide attitude isn’t on display in the new Slate piece. Instead, I noticed something funnier: while I’ve read a number of the books cited in this article, I’ve actually read only one book by any of these contemporary authors (Little, Big by John Crowley).

Now back to Raffles & Bulstrode! (which means I’m just about to finish book five)

I think Wal-Mart’s “Hot Release Tuesday” may be the grossest name ever for a promotion, but today actually sees a couple of releases that I’m enthused about:

War and Peace – A new Tolstoy translation by Pevear & Volokhonsky! This pair jump-started the wave of new translations of the Russians with their 1990 edition of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the hardcover of which was the most expensive novel I ever bought (as far as I can recall)! Here’s a short essay from Richard Pevear on how he and his partner Larissa work.

Oblivion with Bells – A new record from Underworld! My wife better stock up on Lamictal or some other anti-epileptic drug, since those beats tend to mess with her head pretty badly.

Schulz and Peanuts – David Michaelis’ biography of Charles Schulz will likely be the first bio I read since David Guralnick’s treatment of Sam Cooke, proving that I have some pretty odd tastes, I guess.

I thought I’d try to make this a regular feature, but I discovered that

1. I couldn’t come up with a single DVD release that would make this list, as I have no interest in Transformers, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip or A Mighty Heart, which convinced me that
2. there aren’t enough new books, records, movies coming out each Tuesday that interest me.